SEO – What You Get is Hardly What You See

As a Tucson SEO expert, people often wonder what it is I actually do, and why I actually do it. Well, lucky you, because you’re about to find out.

The Beginning:

I started off knowing absolutely nothing about the subject; I didn’t even venture to guess what actually went on within the field until I sort of got the gist of the PURPOSE. That alone was enough to propel me into the junkyard, or palace closet (if you’re organizational skills and motivation are the antithesis of my own) – whichever you prefer – of: meta tags, alt-tags, blogs, long tail keywords, blog commenting, video/image hosting sites, social media, webmaster tools, business listings, PPC advertising, analytics and metrics, backlinks, REL coding, etc. All for: search rankings.

It may not seem like much, or at least it sounds gimped to me, but there’s a lot there. Each thing has a web of its own, so you’re talking about more like 20-30 things related to SEO, not 10-15. When all is said and done though, and you’ve laced every little text field you can attack with dozens of loaded words and phrases – because that’s the majority of what SEO really is honestly, besides some back-end coding (sorry to burst your bubble if you were hoping for some awesome content on “what I do”) – what’s left?

Why did you do what you did?

Well, long story short, and I said this already before – it’s for search rankings.

If it’s still not clicking, then put yourself in the shoes of a business owner with a website. Now, think of yourself as a make-shift traffic director. You’re that policeman at the broken light that people think is favoring other drivers coming through the intersection, and really – you are. Why let Joe Schmoe be on time to work when Ricky is late to work and you see him approaching the intersection caught in the jam?

Enough with the metaphor though. Seriously, why let just anybody stumble upon your site and hope it’s someone who actually wants something from there? Why let only people who are looking specifically for your business find it ONLY because they were TRYING to find it? Why let tons of people who are truly interested in what you’re offering just slip away because you’re buried so far back in the search results that, besides locally and non-virtually, you really don’t exist?

Why do all those things when you can focus on a certain niche (and that doesn’t necessarily connote that it’s small) that’s actually relatively interested in your product or service? The answer is: you shouldn’t. So don’t, and start doing SEO now.

When you raise search rankings for your business your goal is to direct as many relatively interested people to your site as possible. The more specific the better, but obviously you’ll be pulling in traffic from broader keywords too.

Some people don’t understand why SEO is important until you ask them to answer one simple question: how many pages of search results do you go through until you change or enter more specific keywords to better find what you’re looking for?

Most people are going to say they never look past the first page. A chunk will admit they hit the ‘next’ button once, but they really aren’t expecting to find what they want if they didn’t anything close on the first page.

When you explain to a business owner that you’ll be putting them on that first page, even better – in the top 3, after having them answer the above question, you are almost guaranteed a spot at the bargaining table. Especially considering they’re probably on page 10 for all they know. It’s just how you play your chips then that determines if you’ll actually be working on that proudly made claim of yours.

If somehow the first question doesn’t get them to understand the importance of SEO then move on to plan B, which is a brief explanation/lesson.

Here’s how that goes:

More people will come to your site, not just a few more either – a lot. If you weren’t on the first page before, odds are you were only getting overly specific searches that led to your site coming up as a top result (i.e. someone searched for your business name specifically and they were already looking for YOUR site, not just any site like yours that could get them what they needed).

At that point it becomes a numbers game, but you’re not just betting on a random group of people hoping that one of them just might happen to need what you provide; the people that find you are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, and this is a fact because they’ve only found your site through searching for something related to your business and what it does. The numbers game doesn’t seem so bad now, especially when you’re on that first page clocking in some major traffic.

Simple as that!

If you want to reap the benefit of those top rankings then all you have to do is a little SEO, well – more than just a tiny bit, but honestly for the profit, it’s worth a little extra cost. Also, if you can’t manage it yourself, you’ll need an SEO agency because this isn’t something you can just leave on the back burner. It needs to stay hot and be stirred constantly if you expect maximum flavor.